Sci-fi buzz is building around Terra Nova

Photograph by: Brook Rushton
, FOX

BEVERLY HILLS, California — Never mind time travel. The most important thing on Jason O’Mara’s mind right now is jet lag.

The Irish actor who grew up wanting to be a rugby player — "I wasn’t the theatre type" — had just stepped off a plane from Queensland, Australia, on a brief break from filming Terra Nova, the big-budget, time-travel drama featuring dinosaurs, flying bugs and a small colony of pioneer settlers trapped in time.

O’Mara’s character, devoted dad Jim Shannon, is among a small group of stragglers who’ve vaulted back in time from the year 2149 in a bid to save the human race. The world of the future is overdeveloped and short on resources; the only escape, it seems, is in the distant past.

O’Mara is used to time-travel TV dramas. He played Sam Tyler in the short-lived U.S. remake of the acclaimed BBC thriller Life on Mars, about a present-day detective who finds himself back in 1973 after being hit by a car.

Flying from Australia to Los Angeles in a single hop isn’t quite like travelling in time, but O’Mara will tell you it’s close enough. Terra Nova is set in a world of pristine jungles crawling with all manner of critters. Somehow, a back lot in Burbank — or even Vancouver — wouldn’t do.

Terra Nova "is going to make a lot of noise," Fox Entertainment president Kevin Reilly predicted to reporters at the summer meeting of the TV Critics Association. O’Mara, though, was simply grateful for a little peace and quiet before being thrown back into the maelstrom of filming.

"I called my family, saying, ’Guess what? I got a new show,’" O’Mara said, recalling how he landed the part. "It’s about a cop who travels in time. And they said, ’I think we’ve seen that one.’

"Sure, I was aware of the similarities when I read the script. But the differences are so overwhelming that I can’t really compare the two, especially from a character point-of-view. Sam Tyler was lost and desperate to get back home. He was thrown into that situation, whereas Jim Shannon is hungry to get he and his family to safety and take care of them. Sam Tyler’s challenges were internal; Jim Shannon’s are external. His challenges have to do with getting on with the day-to-day in this new world, just trying to stay alive with all the wildlife, which can be a little tricky at times."

Terra Nova — co-produced by Steven Spielberg, written by Star Trek: The Next Generation veterans Brannon Braga and Rene Echevarria and directed in part by Canadian Emmy-winner Jon Cassar — is the most ambitious, expensively mounted network TV drama since Lost. Production on the pilot episode was delayed twice, first by extensive flooding in northeastern Australia last December and January, then by increasingly complicated post-production work involving multiple layers of computer-generated effects.

Terra Nova, slated for 13 episodes, was to debut in midseason. It will premiere in the fall instead. This time, though, it will make its air dates.

O’Mara admitted it took him a while to get used to acting in front of a green screen — a blank screen against which special effects are added later. Actors have to imagine what it would be like to be charged by a Tyrannosaurus rex, for example, without having the white-knuckle experience of actually being attacked by a reptile the size of a small building.

"I took Green Screen 101," O’Mara said. "It was the class right after lunch on a Thursday. And that’s seen me through.

"No, honestly, there is no training for it. I think experience is probably the best preparation. I get a second take, which is always useful, when I blow the first one. And we have Stephen Lang (in the cast), who has become the maestro of how to react to things that aren’t there. He did it for three years on Avatar. Sometimes I go to him and say, ’Too much?’"

Filming has concluded on the eighth episode; O’Mara would jump aboard a plane to resume work on the ninth episode shortly after meeting reporters. Terra Nova, once tagged with the label "troubled production," has taken on a life of its own. There’s now a buzz of nervous anticipation, where before there was only a sense of rising panic.

Cassar’s arrival, according to Braga and Echevarria, made a huge impact. The Ottawa-raised director, a veteran of the real-time thriller 24 — Cassar directed more episodes than any other director and was promoted to executive producer early in the series’ run — threw himself body and soul into Terra Nova, and wrestled the production under control.

"Jon Cassar really helps," O’Mara said. "He is very specific in his direction, and that gives you a kind of safety net. You rely on your director to have your back. We rely on our collective imaginations to envisage that the creature we’re looking at is actually there, taking up space, so close you can practically smell it. I’ve had several personal interactions with these creatures. They weren’t there on set, but I felt them on me, taking chunks out of me, and all sorts of other things. Ripping my clothes.

"It’s something you learn as you go along."

Terra Nova was re-edited after the initial pilot episode, to focus more on the family — and the actors playing the family — and less on the jungle creatures, although critters will still play a part.

"We’re cheaper than the dinosaurs," O’Mara quipped. "We’re not quite as high-maintenance."

Spielberg — or, as the cast calls him, Mr. Spielberg — is rarely on set in person, but is a constant presence.

"There have been a couple of occasions when we were playing a scene when we’ve felt his presence," O’Mara said. "I remember once Jon saying, ’Actually, we are going to do this this way.’ And I stupidly said, ’Why?’ And he said, ’Well, that’s what Mr. Spielberg wants.’ He’s present on the set, even if he physically isn’t there. And I think his presence is felt in the finished product, too."

Queensland is eerily beautiful, O’Mara said, even to a transplanted Irishman.

"Because we do all feel so far from home, we’ve had to create a sense of adventure, this idea that we are there to do something very special and that perhaps hasn’t been done before. It’s funny — we really do feel like these displaced pioneer families in the middle of this wild, untouched wilderness. That makes our job a little easier as actors."

O’Mara laughed off suggestions that the human characters in Terra Nova will encounter some kind of prehistoric ancestor to humankind.

"This is 85 million years in the past," he said. "They weren’t around for another 84 million."

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